


They Were Different

by stelmariais



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Heaven, Introspection, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 11:41:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/773804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stelmariais/pseuds/stelmariais
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The soul of a human is different from anything Castiel had seen before. In a universe so infinite, why is a single relationship so important to them?</p>
            </blockquote>





	They Were Different

He was immeasurably old. Unfathomably old, in human terms. His kind measured time much differently. He had seen stars be born and grow old and explode. He had watched galaxies form and eventually disappear into nothingness. He had watched as his Father created new planets and inhabited them with various creatures. He had been present for the creation of Earth, watched as matter was organized and order established. Just another innocuous planet, he had thought at the time, nothing particularly different about this one from all the others.

But what his Father had eventually led to be placed on this planet - they were different. 

It took millennia for them to develop into what they would finally be, and his Father breathed life into them. And something was different. These beings had been given souls. 

As he watched, he saw that the humans had the capacity for so much more than he had seen in any of his Father's other creations, either on this planet or others. He watched as they discovered how to sustain themselves on food and animals that they raised and altered to be most beneficial to them. He watched as they recognized the benefits of living together - too many people in too small of a space. He watched as they built cities and empires and created alliances and slaughtered each other and worshipped their God, in whatever form they were able to understand. He watched as they grew and expanded and spread out over the face of the earth. He watched as they moved from one place to another, conquering those they found and creating new civilizations. 

He thought he understood them. He saw their potential for greatness as a whole and believed then that what made them important was their ability to create and innovate and shape the world around them and respond to circumstances both terrible and wonderful. As a whole. He thought that this was how having souls made them different. 

But what he came to understand after millennia of observation was that their potential for greatness was not exemplified in how they acted as a whole. Of course, that was important, but he began to look at them more closely and on a much smaller level. Their histories told of the large scale, but this is not what was really important. He noticed that for every great war that was fought, a mother wept over the loss of her son. For every conquering army that swept across the face of the land, a soldier missed the land of his memories and the people he had once known. For every disease that swept a continent, taking millions with it, a daughter shouldered new responsibility for her brothers after her parents were gone. 

This is what souls made humans: although there were things taking place that were much bigger than them and often beyond their control, each human found their purpose for existing in their relationships with just a handful of individual humans. He understood, now: what made humans different was their capacity to love each other passionately and as though nothing else in the universe mattered. 

Entire galaxies swirled above their heads, appearing and existing and dying in the infinite universe, and the most important thing for one man to do was to do anything to save his brother. 

He was not like them, and was made only to love his Father and to follow the orders of his superiors. For all the celestial power that had been bestowed upon him, he was not capable of the love humans were. At least, not yet. What he did not realize was that the simple touch of a human soul could create new possibilities in him - things he had never imagined only because he could not fathom them before. He had existed for longer than any human could imagine and yet, the moment he reached out in rescue and laid his hand upon the soul of the righteous man trapped in hell (battered but still the brightest he had ever seen), he suddenly understood for the first time what it was to love another with such ferocity he believed it could actually kill him.


End file.
